Dr. Demento

Gets serious about John Fahey

Other than being one of the world's most manic
record collectors, host of long-running, widely-syndicated Dr. Demento
radio show (which the editor of PSF grew up on and worshipped), perpetrator
of many enlightened articles, liner notes and compilations, Barret Hansen
had one of his first forays into the music industry with his work with
John Fahey in the '60's as one of his earliest fans and supporters.

PSF: How did you first hear about John's work?

I was going to Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Around 1960, a fellow student who was a guitarist had a copy of his very
first album, the one that there were only 95 copies of. He said 'you ought
to hear this guy.' He knew nothing about him (Fahey). He just bought this
album sight unseen in a store in Los Angeles, which caters mainly to jazz
and blues buffs. So he wasn't sure whether John Fahey and Blind Joe Death
were the same person. I remember him saying 'I can tell you that both sides
were played on the same guitar, is all I know.' I borrowed his copy and
made a reel-to-reel tape of it and enjoyed that frequently for the next
few years.

Then flash forward four years later and I'm going
to UCLA graduate school for folk music studies. The story is told in my
notes in the beginning of The Return of the Repressed.

PSF: When you first met up with John, what did you
think of him on a personal level?

He was skinny back then, dressed in a work-short
and Levis blue jeans. He seemed very friendly because he had come to UCLA
for the first time for the folk festival that they used to have there.
He was just pleasantly surprised to see that somebody he'd never seen before
knew about his first album 'cause the distribution had been so limited.
I didn't know it was him- I had no idea what he looked like. But there
I saw someone carrying an armload of albums which said 'John Fahey' on
them. It was the first pressing of his second album. I couldn't resist
stopping him, saying, 'Oh, a new John Fahey album!' He quickly said 'Oh
yeah, I'm John Fahey.'

PSF: What was it about his work that struck you as
being so unique?

I suppose it was the combination of two things that
I loved: on the one hand, traditional blues and so-called ragtime guitar
and on other hand, harmonies associated with contemporary classical music.
Nobody had done anything like that before.

PSF: How did you first come to work with John?

The fall after the folk festival, which would have
been '64, John enrolled in the same program that I was in. Then by pure
coincidence, he moved in next door to me in Venice at a little beach area
about 5 or 6 miles outside from Venice. Venice today is very gentrified
and trendy. In those days, you could rent a nice cottage for $65 a month
so that was a place where students could live. So, just by coincidence,
we moved in next to each other. So between UCLA and Venice, we saw quite
a bit of each other. That was the time when he was just starting to do
some gigs. All through the early years of his career, he never performed
in public.

PSF: Why was that?

I guess it just never occurred to him until he moved
to Berkeley, which was the year I met him. There he found a few more people
who were interested in what he was doing. He was certainly shy about it
at first. He always had stage fright, at least all through the earlier
years of his career. It's why he developed the habit of bringing the big
bottle of Coke on stage with bourbon in it. He readily admitted, at least
to me, it was to help him through his stage fright.

PSF: Were you promoting his work and encouraging
him then?

As best as I could. I was not any kind of celebrity
then. I was just Barry Hansen, graduate student in folk music studies.
I'd done a teensy bit of writing but that was about all. Dr. Demento was
still in the future. I worked at the Ash Grove and one thing I always did
was... I was usually in charge of putting on the music that was on in the
background before the show began. I'd always play John's albums, the only
two that he had at that time.

PSF: Was there interest in the music from other people
around there?

A few people said 'what's that?' There was one waitress
who hated it: 'don't play that shit again!' But I'd play it at least now
and then anyway. For a while, I played it every night. I guess she got
tired of it. (laughs)

PSF: I know that you traveled to the South with John.
Were you with him when he was looking for people like Bukka White?

No, that was before I knew him. I wasn't on the trip
where he found Skip James either but I knew all those people. They're all
gone now. Bill Barth (of the Insect Trust) lived in town so I knew him.
I remember that they phoned me and said 'We just found Skip James.'

PSF: So you think that led to the folk blues revival
at the time?

Certainly those two people. There were quite a few
other people who were similarly rediscovered around the same time, like
Mississippi John Hurt and Fred McDowell who never made records before.
Lance Lipscomb was one of the first. Bukka and Skip were two of the best
so you can't take that away from John. Stephen Calt, who wrote that book
about Skip (I'd Rather Be the Devil), did everything he could to
disparage John- don't bother with that one. There's a book about Charlie
Patton that also disparages John, which is pretty good.

PSF: Revenant is coming out with a box set on Patton-
one of John's last projects.

Of course, most of that material is already available
on Yazoo but I'm sure that Revenant will do a terrific job.

PSF: John had kind of an impish attitude towards
some of his work. He took on different pseudonyms and made up stories in
his liner notes. Did you see that side of John much?

He liked to put people on. John liked to do things
that befuddled people. I think he loved to have people say 'what the fuck?'
He would do weird things like taking a few copies of the Blind Joe Death
album and just snuck them into stores, put them into record bins so people
would buy them. John frequently talked to me (I don't think he did this)
about finding someone who could still press 78's out of shellac. I was
involved in some of those 78's but they were vinyl so any collector could
tell that they were newly made. He really wanted to find someone who could
make shellac records, not just the way they looked in the '40's but the
way they looked in the '20's. So then, he could make phony old blues records
of his own playing and sneak them into thrift stores.

PSF: John was in the folk program but he also seemed
to have some kind of mistrust of academia. Did you find that yourself?

Oh yeah. Once he got exposed to more of it, he developed
a disdain for it. I did too in my own way.

PSF: So you think he was part of it and yet he wasn't.

That's well put. His approach was to do these subtle
spoofs of academia. That's a thread that winds through all the notes in
the early Takoma albums. They were also full of private jokes about his
friends. If you see a reference to Tree Sloth Man, that's me. Sometimes,
he'd only subtlety change the names. He was also responsible for Alan Wilson
of Canned Heat meeting Bob Hite. He was also responsible for Al's nickname,
Blind Owl.

PSF: Of those early records, do you have any favorite
moments where you were around for the creation?

I was around for Days Have Gone By (1967)
as I recorded some of the sound effects for the raga track. And of course
The
Yellow Princess (1969), which I co-produced in a more orthodox manner.
That was done in a regular, legit recording studio with me setting up the
times for the sessions and bringing in the backing musicians. Of course,
John himself pretty much picked the repertoire. We kind of consulted on
picking the takes. The other one I worked on was The Transfiguration
of Blind Joe Death, the one that started out on Riverboat Records and
then became a Takoma release.

PSF: How was it to work with John in that capacity?

He pretty much had his mind made up as to what he
wanted to do. It was just up to me to help make it happen. With The
Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965), it's really two half albums.
He recorded half of it on the East coast and then he need some more tracks
to make an album. We didn't have the budget for a legit studio for that
one. So I found someone who had a real nice home recorder and a quiet room.
I pretty much set John up and let him play. He was all by himself for most
of it. I wasn't even around for many of the takes. I set him up and let
him play. He sat there with a dog at his feet. There's one track where
the dog barks in the middle of the music- it was my decision to leave that
false start in.

PSF: After those records that you did with him, how
often were you in touch with him in the '70's?

We kind of went our separate ways a little bit. When
he performed, I'd go and see him. We'd talk on the phone now and then.
I remember when he got married to his first wife- he had me over by that
time. Then I remember when he married Melody and was living in Los Angeles.
I had gotten married by that time so we had several evenings together,
the two couples. Other times, we wouldn't see each other for a while so
we kind of went in and out of each otherís lives. Then when he moved to
Salem, we didn't see each other that much. There were occasional phone
calls and postcards.

Then Rhino decided they wanted to do that 2 CD set
so that resulted in my seeing him for the first time in the flesh for a
while. I went up to Salem to interview him and go over the track selection.

PSF: Had his attitude about his own work changed
much by then?

He'd done more public appearances so it wasn't such
a terror to him anymore. He got more used to being on the road. He did
other things. He told me 'I just got back from India' he reported at that
stage in his life.

PSF: Was that a big change for him?

Yeah but... the only religion I had heard him talk
about before was the Episcopalian Church he was raised in, as was I. That
was another thing we had in common. Then of course, he'd talk about German
philosophers all the time. It didn't surprise me then when he got involved
in Indian religion. He liked the music I know.

PSF: Did you see him as a spiritual person?

Yeah. Not the kind who went to church often for sure.
But certainly always spiritual. He never went to church any other time
that I knew him but he would, in his early concerts, always close with
a hymn. He eventually made a whole album of hymns, along with the Christmas
albums. Spiritual, yeah... I was maybe a little bit of a smart-aleck in
those days but if I ever said anything smart-alecky about religion, he
did not want to hear anything like that. One could criticize the church,
sure, but not religion.

PSF: When he moved to Oregon, did you notice any
changes about John?

At first, he loved it. It seemed more serene. He
wanted some place where it was quieter, where there was less crime, less
traffic. He loved the green countryside. He was near a railroad track and
he liked that. He loved to watch trains. Another thing he had in common
with me.

Of course, two bad things happened. He came down
with the Epstein-Barr syndrome, which was something that just kind of snuck
up on him. Then the divorce. Those two things were linked, I think. The
Epstein-Barr syndrome sapped his energy and Melody just got tired of him
lying around the house, not doing anything. Then there was that sad story
that he lost his house and didn't have any money. When I went up to Salem
to do the work on the Rhino compilation, I had to get his guitar out of
pawn. He hocked the guitar so he could pay the rent at the welfare motel
he was living in. Then a year after that, he went to live in a gospel mission
for a while.

PSF: It seemed though that some of these things,
like hocking his guitar and living in hotels, were things he did regardless
after he got 'rediscovered' himself.

Yeah, that's true. He even seemed OK with life at
the gospel mission. He didn't entirely enjoy having to sit through sermons
but it wasn't as hard on him as it might have been on some of the other
people there. But I think he kind of liked having companionship.

PSF: He seemed to disparage his older work at that
time. Did you find that?

Not to face though I certainly heard that he did
that. I can understand that, especially after his new electronic thing
got going. We were working on the Rhino project, which was a little before
his involvement with Thurston Moore and all of that. At that time, he seemed
very much into the project of bringing these old recordings back into print
again. Most of them were out of print at that time.

PSF: Who initiated that?

Rhino. There's a fellow in the A&R department
named James Austin who's a big Fahey fan. He brought me into the project.

PSF: So you were saying John was enthused about this
project.

Yeah. We spent the afternoon with my tape recorder
on and through various correspondence, we had picked all the tracks. James
came up with an initial list, I made a few changes and then we submitted
it to John. He said 'Can we put this one in? I don't know if we want to
have this one in.' So, he made a few changes himself, but not many.

PSF: Was he pleased with the final result?

Yes, I think so.

PSF: You too?

I was happy with it. It was maybe a year later that
I got one of my occasional late night phone calls from him. He said 'Have
you ever heard of Sonic Youth?' I said that I had. He said 'I got one of
their records and I really like their music.' Which surprised me, but it
really shouldn't have. John frequently discovered things that one wouldn't
expect and turned out to like them. So, that was another stage.

I got to hand it to him. Frankly, in his later years,
technically he couldn't quite do the same sort of picking that he did in
the '60's and the '70's- the double-thumbing and all that. It just got
to the point where he couldn't do it at that speed anymore. The last time
I saw him do an acoustic performance, he tried but everything seemed to
be at half-speed and not very energetic. He was playing these kind of medleys,
like on the America (1971) album though that was a number of years
later.

I really got to hand it to him because he found a
way that he could make music that was recognizably him but was new and
that it didn't matter anymore whether he could do that fast double-thumbing.
He could do the things he could still do and found a new way to present
them with the electronic elements. And he brought back the musique concrete
that had been evident (in his work) as far back as The Great San Bernardino
Birthday Party (1966). He kind of made a new version of himself that...
I don't know if the sales of his last few albums were commensurate with
the ones in the '60's and the '70's but he certainly got a lot of attention
so he felt validated.

PSF: When you said some elements of this were already
in his work, is that what you meant when you said you were a little surprised
but shouldn't have been?

Like the album with Cul de Sac (The Epiphany of
Glenn Jones, 1997), that sounds radical and different from what he'd
done before. But you put that on next to "A Raga Called Pat" and you can
see there's a thread that links them together.

PSF: So you think he just had a certain restlessness
to his nature?

Sure.

PSF: That seemed to be the biggest turning point
or break in his career.

In a sense yes, in a sense no. You put one of the
last few albums on and your immediate reaction is 'wow, that's much louder
than what he did before and there's all this other sound.' But then that
was, at least from The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party onward,
always a part of his approach. It was maybe not what he was best known
for. I think a lot of people in the '60's would tend to skip over the musique
concrete stuff, looking for the nice clean picking and the interesting
progressions as they skip over "Requia" and things like that. I know I
did- I liked his more orthodox picking better myself. That was just my
taste. But the other stuff was always there. And you can take that thread
back to "The Transcendental Waterfall" even though that doesn't have any
other sounds in it. It's certainly the most free-form, experimental and
less orthodox side of his nature.

PSF: His relationship to his audience seemed to be
confrontational sometimes. Did you see that yourself?

Oh yes, especially when he had too much to drink.
He would bait the audience. He would say racist things for instance and
he'd bait women in the audience.

PSF: Stage fright?

Partly. And he liked to test people. He certainly
tested me sometimes. John did not really know the meaning of the word 'tact.'
Or at least if he did, it didn't apply to him. He said what he thought,
drunk or sober. Even if it hurt his own career and even if he knew it might,
he still said what he felt.

PSF: Dean said that John was coming to peace with
his old work in the end. Did you find that?

The subject never came up in the last few communications
we had, which was by e-mail. The last few were all about Revenant. Basically,
he was saying 'that was a great album' and 'can you think of any more projects
for Revenant?' There were no generalized evaluations of his work. I'm glad
to hear that he felt that way.

PSF: What did you think of the work he was doing
with Revenant?

Fantastic stuff. Packaging was wonderful, it knocked
you out. The sound restoration was state of the art. The music was well-chosen
too for the most part. That Beefheart album is in a way just for completists
and specialists but there are enough of those. I was certainly interested
in it. I was a little disappointed not to find anything that I could play
on my radio show in there but still, it was great.

PSF: Other than the Revenant releases, what else
was John most interested in during the last few times you contacted him?

He talked a lot about the classical records he was
finding in thrift shops. When I visited him in Salem, we went on a few
expeditions to thrift shops. He had large stacks of these albums in his
room at the welfare hotel and talked about them. I knew something about
classical music and old LP's so I guess he was happy to find somebody to
talk about that stuff with. So that seemed to be the main thing on his
mind.

At that time, in '94, his musical direction (the
electronic phase hadn't begun yet) was that he wanted to make an album
of '50's soft rock and roll tunes. He was convinced that it was going to
be just as big as his Christmas album. He would play me tunes like "Twilight
Time" and "To Know Him Is To Love Him." After we got the guitar out of
hock, we went to see a friend of his who ran a used record store out on
the edge of Salem. He got out the guitar and played several '50's pop tunes,
quite nicely though it wasn't music that had much challenge to it. He basically
played the melodies like he played the Christmas carols on his Christmas
album. But he was excited about that as a commercial possibility. But then
his mind went in another direction, probably a better one at least in terms
of finding a new audience. His version of "To Know Him Is To Love Him"
wouldn't have found him any kind of a critical new audience though it might
have sold some records. (ED NOTE: some of the Ď50ís songs did appear on
Old
Girlfriends and Other Horrible Memories, 1990)

PSF: What do you think John's legacy might be?

A lot of music that is very varied. Just like Stravinsky,
he went through different periods, creating something of value in each
period. Some of it is heavier, some of it is lighter. It all has value.
I'm sure like with any other composer, some is going to be more highly
esteemed than others. But it's really a very impressive corpus of music.
At the same time, he influenced a lot of other people. Leo Kottke, for
sure. Whether John liked it or not, the Windham Hill people too. (William)
Ackerman certainly wouldn't have sounded the same way without John being
around.

PSF: You seem to be describing John as a classical
musician.

Yeah. I think John liked the label 'American Primitive'
but he wanted to be known as a composer, not just as a picker. I think
that's how he'll go down in history, as a composer who for a while could
also play some pretty decent guitar though he readily admitted his fingers
weren't as fast as Kottke's. He could still get around pretty well for
a while.

But it's the compositions that he'll be known for
and his writing, I imagine. Which is something that's come to the fore
more in the recent times, with his book having come out (How Bluegrass
Music Destroyed My Life ). The liner notes were always there but you
could consider them as incidentals, as many people did. But it was certainly
him expressing himself. Even if the Transfiguration album might
be better remembered for "Brenda's Blues" or "The Death of the Clayton
Peacock" but the notes are real fascinating too.

PSF: Do you think John might have had an effect on
your own work?

Oh, I can't say it influenced the Dr. Demento show,
which is what I became known for. We certainly had a lot of discussions
about the meaning of blues, which might have subtlety influenced the book
I just wrote (Rhino's Cruise Through The Blues). He certainly helped
me see what makes the Delta Blues tick and other kinds of pre-war acoustic
blues music.

PSF: What about any outlooks on music or his spirituality?

It was certainly moving but I think we agreed to
disagree. I respected the way he felt. He didn't try to convert me. When
he came back from India, he might have tried a little harder to convert
me at that time, to that way of thinking than he ever did to Christianity.

PSF: That didn't work though.

No, I'm fairly set in my ways. (laughs)

PSF: Is there anything else you wanted to say about
John?

It was great the way that he renewed his creative
energy in his last years and got a better outlook than he had before. Found
a new audience. It was just too damn bad he couldn't renew his body.

PSF: How had his outlook changed?

He was creating new music that was exciting people.
More and more people were coming to know him as someone who had a strong,
valid position on the American music scene and had for a long time. I think
he was beginning to realize this. It renewed his energy. And he was making
music that was more exciting than he had in the '80's or in the early '90's.
But he just couldn't do much about his body. I'm just saying that it's
too bad.